She rose quietly and went to check on Lloyd, surprised to find him wide awake and looking out the window. He turned to meet her eyes, and she saw in that moment her real son, the one she had known before Jake was arrested. He looked better today, and she realized he had actually slept all night for the first time since they’d found him, without waking up and yelling for a drink. He smiled with a hint of sadness. “Hi, Ma.”
Miranda moved closer, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “How do you feel?”
He sighed. “Weak. But the pain isn’t so bad anymore.” He looked her over. “I can’t believe you and Pa came here looking for me. You especially. You could have been killed, or something worse.”
“I was not about to let Jake come alone. I just got him back after four years of prison. Besides, I knew you could be hurt and I might be the only one who could help.”
He reached out and took her hand. “How did you get Pa to let you come?”
She smiled. “I have my ways.”
Lloyd grinned. “Yeah, he is pretty soft when it comes to you.” His smile faded. “You must both hate me. I deserted you, walked out on Pa, left you and Evie to fend for yourselves.”
She squeezed his hand. “Lloyd, there is absolutely nothing a child can do to make his parents hate him. Nothing.” She leaned down and kissed his cheek. “You had a right to be angry with your father, disappointed in him. But you also have a special gift now that your father never had, Lloyd. It’s something I know your father would give anything for.” She stroked his hair back from his forehead, thinking how utterly handsome this son of hers was, how wonderful it felt to have him looking at her with the gentle eyes of the old, trusting Lloyd. “You have a chance to make amends with your father. That’s something Jake never had. If you think it hasn’t bothered Jake that he killed his father, you’re very, very wrong, Lloyd. That is what led to his confusion, to the desperate kind of life he led for so long. He was only fifteen, Lloyd. He didn’t know what to do, where to turn. There was no one he could go to but the outlaw friends of his father, and he got caught in a vicious circle, thinking he was no good because his father told him so every single day of his life.”
She reached over to a stand beside the bed and picked up the cross and rosary Jake had left there. She held it up. “Jake never showed you this. It belonged to his mother. She was a good and gentle woman, sold to a brutal man. Jake’s father killed her, and killed Jake’s little brother. He beat your father viciously from the earliest Jake can remember. Your father saw some terrible things when he was growing up, Lloyd, but he knew that there must be some kind of goodness in this world. It just took him a long time to find it; and he always kept this to remind him of it.”
She pressed the cross into Lloyd’s hand. “Your father is not the bad man his own father was. He has his mother’s goodness in him, and so do you. I hope to God you never believed those rape charges. The woman he risked his life to save the day of that robbery finally came forward to testify that your father had nothing to do with that robbery or her abduction that day. He actually rescued her and brought her back home. She had been living in Europe these last few years and didn’t know your father had been put in prison. It was not an easy thing for her to come forward like that, but because of it, your father is free now, and we can be a family again, Lloyd. Please, please come home with us. Evie is married to a doctor now, and she’s expecting a baby. She wants so much for her brother to come home.”
Lloyd lifted his hand and studied the cross. “I don’t know if I’d fit in anymore. There’s too much to forgive.”
“There’s nothing to forgive anymore. Don’t throw away the gift of family, Lloyd. Your father knows how important family is. He never had the love and support you have always had. To him it’s a wonderful blessing, something to be treasured. I’m not saying Jake didn’t do other bad things. It’s a fact that he did. He was an outlaw, but he was also a lost little boy just lashing out at the world that had hurt him so much. The man I married, the man who was such a good father to you, is nothing like the outlaw. You have to admit, Lloyd, that you could not have asked for a more loving, attentive father.”
Lloyd’s eyes misted, and he squeezed the cross. “That’s the hell of it. He had a right to hate his father. I didn’t. Not really. I was just so angry, I guess, that he never told me. I thought we were so close. Even at that, maybe we could have worked it out if not for Beth.” A tear slipped down his cheek and he wiped at it, embarrassed. “I loved her, Ma. I still do.” He breathed deeply and swallowed. “I don’t understand why she got married so quick. Her father must have forced her into it. I know she loved me. Every time I picture her with some other man, it makes me feel crazy, and then I need a drink, and that leads to blaming Pa all over again, makes me hate him.” He sniffed and wiped at his eyes with his fingers. “Not anymore, though. What’s done is done, I guess, and you’re right about family. I want to come home. As soon as I felt Pa’s arms around me when he cut me down out there, I knew I loved him and wanted to come home.”
He looked past her then to see Jake standing in the doorway. “I’m sorry about Beth, son,” the man told him, his own eyes looking misty. “Damn sorry.” Jake came farther into the room, running a hand through his hair, still looking tired.
For the first time since Jake had rescued him, Lloyd took a good, clear-minded look at his father, realizing how much he had aged. His hair was peppered with gray, and the lines of hard prison life showed around his eyes; but he was still a good-looking man with an air of strength and power about him. He noticed the man limped a little as he walked around to the other side of the bed. He had a vague memory of the shoot-out in California, had a feeling the hip wound was from that and not from taking a fall from a horse, as his father had once told him when he was younger. There were so many things he wanted to know the truth about.
“I thought I heard voices in here. You look a lot better today,” Jake was saying.
“I feel better.”
Miranda rose, deciding to leave the room and let them talk. “You two need some time alone. I’m going to make both of you a nice, big breakfast,” she told them. She leaned down and kissed Lloyd once more, then left, closing the door behind her.
Jake sat down in a chair beside the bed. “You still hate me for not letting you have the whiskey?”
Lloyd closed his eyes for a moment. “No. I’m sorry for the things I said, Pa. I’m sorry for a lot of things. I never hated you. I just wanted to hate you. The whiskey made it all easier.”
“You’ve got to stay away from it, Lloyd. I lived with that hell for the first fifteen years of my life, with a man who went crazy when he drank. That’s just the way it is for some men, and you’re one of them. The difference is, my pa was mean clear through, and all the time. Whiskey just made him even meaner. I’ve got scars on my back you’ve never seen because I never let you. I didn’t want to have to explain about a father who beat me with the buckle end of a belt from when I wasn’t more than two; who murdered my mother and my little brother. You think it’s terrible that I shot him, but he was a brutal, brutal man. He was raping a young girl I cared about very much, and I didn’t know how else to stop him. After that, I didn’t know how to stop myself from falling into a life of crime. It just seemed like that was all I was fit for, and I had nobody to guide me.”
He stopped to light a cigarette he had brought into the room with him, leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “It’s not like that for you. You had me to guide you, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that the path you’re taking will only lead to a life of pure hell, full of regrets that eat at you on the inside like a cancer. If you hate things about my past so much, then why create one just like it for yourself?”
“I don’t know.” Lloyd stared at the ceiling. “I just wanted to hurt you like you had hurt me. Why didn’t you tell me a long time ago, Pa?”
Jake took a deep dr
ag on the cigarette, blowing out the smoke with a deep sigh. “I was afraid. From the day you were born I knew that through you I could somehow recapture my own youth and relive it in a whole different light. I could be the father I never had. I was ashamed of the man. I never wanted you to know the kind of man your grandfather was, and I sure as hell never wanted to see the same shame in your eyes for me that I had for him. I saw it the day you visited me in jail back in St. Louis.”
Lloyd turned to look at him, for the first time noticing the crippled look to his right hand when the man put the cigarette to his lips again. “What happened to your hand, Pa?”
Jake took the cigarette in his other hand, flexed the crippled one as best he could. “I, uh, I made a vow when you were born, Lloyd, that because of my own pa, I would never, never lay a hand on you. That day you visited me, after I hit you, I felt a rage at myself. I guess I started hitting the wall, so they tell me. I didn’t stop until I broke pretty near every bone in my hand, wasn’t even aware of what I was doing until I wore myself out and couldn’t keep it up.”
“My God, Pa…I didn’t know.”
Jake smiled sadly and shrugged. “I can still shoot a rifle with it, but I have to rely on my left hand now to draw and shoot a revolver.” He took another drag on the cigarette, staring at the floor then. “You want to talk about pain? I know pain, Lloyd, from this hand to bullet wounds to brutal beatings to losing someone you love. There isn’t one loss or form of pain you can suffer that I can’t understand.” He raised his eyes then to meet Lloyd’s gaze. “But I’ll tell you one thing. I’d take on every bit of your pain too, if I could do it. I’d take away the physical pain, the whiskey jitters, the pain in your heart over Beth, I’d gladly suffer all of it if there was any possible way I could take it all off you.” He blinked back tears. “But I can’t, and that’s the hell of it.”
Lloyd put a hand to his eyes. “I’m sorry, Pa, about your hand, about deserting you like I did.”
Jake rose and put the cigarette into an ashtray. He leaned over the boy, grasping the head rail of the bed with one hand. “I’m not telling you these things to make you feel sorry for me or to try to force you to love me, Lloyd. I’m telling you so you understand what you mean to me. You could torture me, verbally abuse me the rest of your life, whatever. It wouldn’t change how I feel about my son. It wouldn’t keep me from turning right around and helping you the minute you asked for it. I’ll always be here for you, Lloyd, any time you need me. I understand all the hurt, all the pain. You have advantages I never had, and you have a family’s love. Don’t turn away from all of that, Lloyd. Don’t let my sorry life destroy your own good one. That was always my biggest fear.”
Lloyd opened his fist to look at the cross. He handed it to his father then. “Ma told me this belonged to your mother.”
Jake sat down on the edge of the bed, taking the cross from him and studying it a moment. “For a long time this was my only link to goodness in life, till I met your mother. The woman is nothing short of a saint for the things she’s had to put up with being married to me.” He sighed deeply. “I just hope to hell I’m the one who dies first, because I couldn’t go on without her.”
Lloyd touched his arm. “Yes, you could, Pa. You’d have me and Evie and your grandchildren.”
Jake looked at the hand on his arm, met the boy’s eyes. “Does that mean you’re coming home with us?”
“Yes, sir, I’d like to. I’d also like you to sit down there and tell me the truth about everything—your past, how you met Ma, what happened in California, all of it.”
Jake sighed, keeping the cross in his hand and moving to sit in the chair again. “Some of it isn’t easy to talk about.”
“I know. Hell, I’ve got all day, more than that. It’s going to be a while yet before I can get out of this bed. We’ve got lots of time to talk.”
Jake smiled, rubbing at the cross with his thumb. “Yeah, I guess we do, don’t we?”
“I love you, Pa. I’m not ashamed, all right? I’m not ashamed.”
Jake closed his eyes and nodded, suddenly unable to speak. He rose and walked to a window, clearing his throat and taking a moment to find his voice again without breaking down. I’m not ashamed. The boy really had no conception of what that meant to him. He quickly wiped at his eyes with the back of his wrist.
“Are you, uh, you really good with those guns?” he asked, needing to change the subject for the moment. Lloyd glanced at his father’s old guns. They hung over the back of a chair. Jake turned to him, followed his gaze. “We found them hanging in the shed,” he explained.
Lloyd met his eyes and grinned almost bashfully. “I’m pretty good, but not as good as Jake Harkner, I’d bet on that.” He could see his father was struggling with emotion, sensed that for the moment he couldn’t go on talking about the past.
Jake smiled sadly. “Good enough to use your guns on the side of the law?”
Lloyd frowned. “What do you mean?”
Jake sat back down in the chair. “I mean that if you come home with us, you’ll have to move to Oklahoma. Part of my resentencing was to assign me to duty as a Deputy U.S. Marshal there.”
Lloyd brightened. “I’ll be damned! You’ll be a marshal? Hell, that’s great, Pa!”
Jake shrugged. “I guess with opening up the land to new settlers, plus some trouble between Indians and ranchers, there’s a need. Besides, a lot of that country is inhabited by wanted men. Who better than somebody like me to search them out? Lord knows I hid out there plenty of times myself.”
“You think they’d deputize me too? We could ride together again, like when we worked on the ranch.”
Jake nodded. “I’d like that.” He walked over to the guns, picked them up. “You couldn’t use these old single-action revolvers, though. Double-action forty-fives, that’s what you want, and no more lever-action rifles. I’ve got a Colt Lightning magazine rifle—a lot faster action.” He stared at the guns, turned to Lloyd. “I figured after prison I’d just give up my guns and say to hell with it. But the fact remains I’m damn good with the things, and Randy says that if I have a chance now to use them for good, why not do it?” He grinned then. “’Course that judge back in St. Louis isn’t giving me a hell of a lot of choice in the matter.”
“I’m glad for you, Pa.” Lloyd pushed with his arms, trying to sit up straighter. He winced with pain.
“Let me help you,” Jake told him, coming closer to the bed. He reached around the boy to support him, helping him scoot up; but before he could let go, Lloyd’s arms were around him. “I’m glad you didn’t get yourself killed trying to help me, Pa.”
Jake crumbled, embracing the boy tighter. “Thank God I found you alive,” he said in a near whisper.
Lloyd felt the man tremble, and he hugged him tighter. Miranda opened the door just then, and she drew in her breath at the sight. Lloyd looked up at her. “I don’t know which one needs holding the worst,” he told her, his voice shaky with emotion. “Me or Pa.”
Miranda came closer, touching Jake’s back. “I think it’s your father, Lloyd. He was thirty years old before anyone held him in a loving embrace.”
Jake kept a tight hold on the rosary beads, and a tighter hold on his son.
***
December 1890
Jake balanced his eleven-month-old grandson on his knee, making the boy laugh when he jiggled him extra fast. “Ba-ba,” the infant said with a grin, using his word for grandpa. He reached out with fat little arms, and Jake took hold of him and let the child rest against his chest. He looked around the room of the rambling, frame house he and Miranda had rented in Guthrie, Oklahoma. His job compelled him to be gone for long periods at a time, but he was home for Christmas, and it was a good feeling.
He breathed deeply of the smell of Miranda’s baking, watched her lovingly as she took some cookies from a baking pan and laid them out on a tray. She gl
anced at him, and he knew she felt the same stirring desire he did at the memory of their lovemaking last night, his first night home in six weeks. He chuckled at the way she actually blushed a little before turning to go back into the kitchen, and already he was anxious for night to come again. Age had certainly not affected their passion or their energy for making love.
In spite of the violence he sometimes experienced when out chasing men through the wilds of Oklahoma’s backcountry, this was the happiest, most peaceful time of his life that he could remember. Living on the ranch in Colorado had been good, and they all missed it; but the cloud of being a wanted man had always been hanging over him. That was gone now. Brian was doing well in his practice, and he and Evie lived only a few houses away, close enough to be company for Miranda when he and Lloyd were out on an assignment.
Brian was out on call right now, and Evie was helping Miranda with the cookies. A Christmas tree stood in the corner, decorated with popcorn and ribbons and cookies…and topped with his mother’s beautiful cross and rosary beads.
He patted little Jake’s back, still a bit overwhelmed that Evie had named her son after his grandfather. He still fought the feeling that he did not deserve all of this happiness, this loving family, this peace; but he had long ago given up trying to convince Miranda she should never have married him, and deep inside he knew life would not have been worth living at all without her.
Lloyd came inside then from picking up the mail, and Jake grew a little alarmed at the look of surprise and near pain in Lloyd’s eyes. He kept the baby in his arms as he sat up a little straighter. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
Lloyd held up an opened letter. “It’s to me,” he said, “from Beth.”
“Beth!” Evie was coming into the room then, followed by Miranda. “What does it say, Lloyd?”
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